Friday in the 33rd Week of Ordinary Time, November 24, 2023

Luke 19, 45-48

Jesus entered the temple area and proceeded to drive out those who were selling things, saying to them, “It is written, My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” And every day he was teaching in the temple area. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people, meanwhile, were seeking to put him to death, but they could find no way to accomplish their purpose because all the people were hanging on his words.

At the beginning of the prophesy from which the Lord Jesus quotes Almighty God speaks through Isaiah: “Let not the son of the stranger, who adhere to the Lord, speak, saying: The Lord will divide and separate me from his people. And let not the eunuch say: Behold I am a dry tree. For thus saith the Lord to the eunuchs, They that shall keep my sabbaths, and shall choose the things that please me, and shall hold fast my covenant: I will give to them in my house, and within my walls, a place, and a name better than sons and daughters: I will give them an everlasting name which shall never perish” (Isaiah 56, 3-5).  The prophesy is about how God will gather into his Temple the Gentiles and well as the Jews.  This turns on its head a thousand years of understanding the Law of Moses as making Israel the very distinct people of God.  It was to the Israelites alone that the Law was given, not even to their relatives the Edomites.  But now God announces that the Gentiles too shall be brought into his worship.  The prophesy goes on to say, “And the children of the stranger that adhere to the Lord, to worship him, and to love his name, to be his servants: every one who keeps the sabbath from profaning it, and who holds fast my covenant:  I will bring them into my holy mount, and will make them joyful in my house of prayer: their holocausts, and their victims shall please me upon my altar: for my house shall be called the house of prayer, for all nations” (Isaiah 56, 6-7).  Notice how there is no mention of circumcision.  It is as if God were saying, “It is I who make these my children, not physical descent from Abraham or mere physical circumcision.  I call them and they respond with faith.”  

And so when the Lord Jesus cries out that the Temple is a house of prayer, he fulfills the prophesy which he quotes, for he overthrows the remnants of the sacrifices of the Old Law through his driving out the animals used for this purpose, and he shows, at the same time, that the old priesthood has come to an end.  All Gentiles and Jews are to worship God together in the Temple and in the Holy Church which succeeds the old Temple which will shortly be destroyed by the Romans.